Posts

Image
  How I Lost Faith in Google I cracked the code for generating corpspeak with personality. Then I lost faith in what the company was selling. I started working at Google in the summer of 2007, straight out of college, as a “new-­grad associate” in the communications department. My first week, I sat with more than a hundred other “Nooglers” (new Googlers) at the company’s weekly staff meeting, T.G.I.F., wearing matching company-issued propeller caps as a kind of ritual hazing. The venue was Charlie’s Cafe, a multilevel auditorium in the heart of the “Googleplex,” the company’s sprawling campus in Mountain View, California. The event felt less like a corporate meeting than like a weekly revival—part stand­up set, part science fair, part sermon, all of it fuelled by keg beer. Google’s founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, were bona-fide public figures by then, and self-­made billionaires multiple times over, but in Charlie’s they were idols. They would often ascend the stage together,...
Post a Comment
Read more
  The Pentagon in Washington, D.C., February 2026 - Nathan Howard / Reuters America’s Trillion-Dollar Failure The Pentagon Is Broken, but Congress Can Fix It Ro Khanna | July 17, 2026 The Department of Defense is in trouble. During U.S. President Donald Trump’s second term, media attention has focused on military parades, high-profile firings, and lectures about haircuts. But since the 1980s, a less acknowledged but just as worrisome development has been progressively undermining the U.S. military: defense acquisition remains stubbornly slow and wildly over budget. The United States is currently contending with different types of conflict and a wider range of adversaries than it has in the past. To keep up, the Defense Department needs to be as nimble as it is strong or it risks losing its ability to respond to global hot spots and to deter great-power conflict. But despite spending more than $1 trillion on defense, the U.S. military has yet to fully update its capabilities and ...
Post a Comment
Read more
Image
  Why Is Syracuse, N.Y., Such a Haven for Legendary Writers? In the frozen shadows of shuttered factories, icons like Toni Morrison, Raymond Carver and David Foster Wallace created some of their greatest work. Listen · 11:52 min 3 July 18, 2026 The cold and the dark have fueled writers for centuries. During winter in the country, “there’s so little to do that if anyone is not in one way or another engaged in intellectual work, he is inevitably bound to become a glutton or a drunkard,” wrote Anton Chekhov, for whom the harsh Russian winter was often a character as much as a setting. In Iceland, where some winter days get about four hours of sunlight, roughly one in 10 residents will publish a book in their lifetime, according to one estimate . A similar current runs through the long, bleak winters in Syracuse, N.Y., which has been called both the rainiest and snowiest city in the United States. But it isn’t widely regarded as a literary haven. It’s often known for its annual state...
Post a Comment
Read more